Bilingual puns! Great stuff! The rule seems to be: if you have a chance to make fun of French, do it!

Today's Wall Street Journal carries a book review of a biography of Mussolini's (main) mistress. Toward the end of the piece, the reviewer notes the following about the author and his "mangled" technique in English:

Quote

...Mr. Bosworth can write with verve, and the two earlier books I read in part, “Mussolini’s Italy” and “Whispering City: Rome and Its Histories,” have many fine passages. But they also have many blunders, and my failure to finish them was due to the pervasive not-quite-rightness of their prose. In “Claretta,” this errancy reaches a whole new level, with solecisms and bafflingly inept formulations at every turn.

For starters, there are redundancies worthy of Dan Brown, such as “personal emotions” and the statement that Mussolini, looking in the mirror, spotted “new wrinkles on his face that had not been there before.” Nonsensical word choices abound: contempt is scribbled, evidence is hostile, stereotypes are aroused, hindsight remarks, opinion reads rumors, and someone protests vivaciously.

As for Mr. Bosworth’s sentences, they tend to be long and muddled. At times he is inadvertently funny in his clumsiness, as when he says that Mussolini, during sex, once “scratched [Claretta’s] nose painfully with the explanation that, sometimes, ‘I lose control.’ ” But it’s hard to do other than groan at a sentence like this: “On 30 January . . . Hindenburg appointed Adolf Hitler chancellor of Germany, a rise to power destined to set Europe ablaze.” The chancellor is a rise? The rise sets Europe ablaze? (Never mind that Churchill’s famous phrase was an injunction to his own Special Operations Executive.)

One expects this sort of thing from Wikipedia but not from the normally rigorous Yale University Press. “My book might be best read,” Mr. Bosworth advises the reader, “with the Sturm und Drang of Clara and Ben’s favourite music, Beethoven’s 7th Symphony, playing loudly in the background.” Perhaps, but not even a German symphony could drown out the screech of English being mangled.

I've heard of James Boswell, but not Bosworth. Who is he? Googling didn't help.

My joke was too obscure: a character in an American TV show called Halt and Catch Fire, and no, he isn't famous!

During a trip to the American South, we encountered some interesting curiosities in language.

A docent in Tennessee at an antebellum mansion kept saying "Mainsion," which we had never heard before. The central part of Tennessee is never referred to as the "central" part of Tennessee. Everywhere in central Tennessee, one sees instead "Middle Tennessee," from TV stations to trucks proclaiming "Middle Tennessee Plumbing." And there are no short or single vowels which cannot be squeezed into annoying-sounding long ones (e.g. "eeny" = "any") or into diphthongs (e.g. "cla-owset" for "closet").

Also noticed: local T.V. reporters have a proper (or almost proper) Midwest (north of the Ohio River) pronunciation, but the T.V. weatherman is allowed to drawl like the local yokels.

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"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

Another curiosity: two docents at the Andrew Jackson estate in Nashville insisted several times that his wife had been accused of being a "bigot." The accusation was used against him in his political campaigns and apparently led to the duel where he killed wife's slanderer.

To be sure, slavery was present on the estate, but that was not the docents' context. They claimed she was called a "bigot" because her divorce from her abusive first husband had not quite been approved by a court before her second marriage to Jackson.

We sent the management a little note about the difference between "bigot" and "bigamist."

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"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"

I had a professor of Byzantine History many moons ago, who opined that a society may be showing signs of trouble, when it constantly exaggerates its language, and inflates things which should not be inflated.

Or, as one learns in the cartoon movie The Incredibles, "if everyone is super, then nobody is."

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"Meet Miss Ruth Sherwood, from Columbus, Ohio, the Middle of the Universe!"